Beware the Trantaloids

Any exobiologists out there might be interested to know that, according to certain wacky sources, the military has captured an alien. There are Septeloids:

“The male non-human originated from the star system Delta Pavonis, 20 light-years from Earth where it was the 4th planet from their sun. It is roughly the same size as our Earth.”

“We called the captured alien Septeloids. That was the identifying alien species name given to them by the astrobiologists on our team. I have no idea how they picked that name as well as some of the other odd-sounding alien species names ending with the suffix of ‘loid.'”

“The travel time to Earth was 18 Earth months using a very complex propulsion system and time-space displacement travel mode. Back then in 1980, we could not understand the alien propulsion system and we never saw his spacecraft.”

And there are Trantaloids:

The source also reportedly stated to Martinez that the home world of the alleged hostile alien species, the Trantaloids, “is the third planet out from the star Epsilon Eridani in the constellation Eridanus at 10.5 light-years away. Although somewhat cooler and fainter than our sun, it is very similar.”

Something about this story was nagging me, besides the fact that it was such weird conspiracy story/ufology mishmash — and then I remembered. “Time-space displacement travel mode”? Epsilon Eridani? Delta Pavonis? Me and some fellow geeks obsessed over that stuff in my college years: we were addicts of an old board game called StarForce, in which you used time-space displacement travel to bop about the local stellar neighborhood, fighting aliens who were based on a few stars nearby…guess which ones? It was a nice star map that we played on, too, that actually had the coordinates of the known stars within (I think) 20 light years of earth.

The crazy conspiracy theorists are still around, but you don’t find games like that any more — this was 30 years ago, before computers took over gaming. I think I still have it stuffed away in a box down in the basement, unless mice have gotten in and eaten all the cardboard.

Must-see TV? Frontline takes on anti-vaxers

This is an excellent review of a program that will be on tonight:

Tonight on Frontline, “The Vaccine War” presents both sides of the controversy over whether young children should be vaccinated for diseases such as measles and polio, and in a rare display of TV-news common sense and independence, one side is shown to be — sorry — wrong. Frontline’s documentary will, I hope, leave any sensible viewer feeling that you’d have be deluded or selfish not to have your kids vaccinated.

Now I’m going to have to tune in just for the unbelievable spectacle of a television show taking a skeptical, science-based view of the issue. It’s broadcast at 8pm Central time on PBS — apparently, it will also be available online as well.

It wasn’t bad — a little dry, not quite as blunt as I’d have liked it to be, but I think it made a good case. They’d show the anti-vaxers making some claim, then they’d show how they were simply wrong. Too much time was given to the doofuses, but I think that had to be done in order to shoot them down.

The most effective bit, though, was the showing of the effects of diseases like whooping cough, which can be easily immunized against. If I were a young parent trying to make a decision about whether to immunize (because I was an ignorant git unaware of the science behind vaccines), a bunch of statistics from an epidemiological study might not be that persuasive…but a video of a baby girl gasping for air and near death because of a disease that I could prevent her from getting, I’d give her the shot. No argument.

Waaaah, Michael Ruse, waaah waaaah waaaaaah!

Sometimes I feel sorry for Michael Ruse. Usually I don’t — and I definitely don’t when he flees to the safety of the baby pen at HuffPo to cry about how mean everyone is to him. Now he is bleating about the criticisms given to Ayala for accepting a Templeton Prize.

The Templeton Foundation was begun by the late Sir John Templeton, who made a great deal of money by starting mutual funds, and is essentially devoted to the promotion of the interaction and harmony between science and religion. It is hardly too strong a term to say that it is an object of derision by many of today’s scientists, including my own colleague here at Florida State University, Sir Harry Kroto who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry (for discovering the structure of complex carbon molecules, “buckyballs”). Richard Dawkins has characterized the president of the Royal Society (of London), Sir Martin Rees, as a “Quisling” (after the war-time Nazi ruler of Norway) for his friendliness to the Foundation. Jerry Coyne, a University of Chicago biologist and a deservedly respected scientist for his work on problems of speciation, runs a blog (Why Evolution is True) where he writes of the foundation’s “history of intellectual dishonesty.” When it was announced that the National Academy of Science’s premises would be used to introduce this year’s prize winner he called it an “outrage.” And then there is Minnesota biologist P. Z. Myers, who runs the blog Pharyngula, and whose splenetic keyboard surely qualifies him for the title of evolution’s answer to Rush Limbaugh. It is not only the Foundation that sends up his blood pressure, but Ayala now also is in his line of fire. He is accused of “intellectual cowardice” and is characterized as “the master of non-committal waffle.” Apparently Ayala received the award purely for “religious apologetics,” even though somewhat inconsistently Ayala is also faulted for not making clear his own position on the God question.

No, Ruse does not link to the article he quotes. After all, I actually addressed specific comments by Ayala which show that he does waffle. This is not inconsistent with winning a prize for religious apologetics, since waffling inconclusively is a fine theological tradition. And yes, he won for religious reasons: the first sentence of the Templeton announcement says he is a scientist “who has vigorously opposed the entanglement of science and religion while also calling for mutual respect between the two”. We know what is important to the Templeton Foundation, after all, and it isn’t scientific integrity.

After all that complaining about critics, what is Ruse’s point? As it turns out, there really isn’t one, just more vague grumpiness.

So while I am a bit wary about the Foundation and shall be watching its future developments – especially now that Sir John is gone and his far-more-evangelical son has taken the reins – I shall continue to defend its existence and its purpose. I don’t want to reconcile science and religion if this implies that religion must be true. At most, I want to show that science does not preclude being religious. But I don’t see that what I want and what others want means that we necessarily have to be bad friends and despise each other.

Ah. Nice to know that Ruse doesn’t despise fascist propagandists who make Oxycontin-fueled jaunts to partake of the sex trade on Caribbean islands.

That’s such a waffly conclusion to his argument that it confirms my suspicion that he’s angling for a Templeton bribe.

That’s a rather severe penalty for woo

Ali Hussain Sibat seems to be a bit of a kook. He was on a silly television show in the Middle East in which he’d make paranormal predictions, and he also was making a religious pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia. The latter was considered just fine; the former has got him in big trouble. The Saudi government convicted him of sorcery and is planning to decapitate him.

Now that is barbarism. Here in America we let fortune-telling frauds get rich, instead.

My feelings are crushed

The NCSE has put out a press release congratulating Ayala for his Templeton Prize, and thanking him for his support of NCSE. It also parrots his defense of the compatibility of science and religion.

You know, I’ve been a long-time supporter of the NCSE, a vocal crusader for better science education and against creationism, and last year I was awarded Humanist of the Year…but no, I didn’t get the tiniest bit of press from NCSE. Was it because I’m not as scientifically reputable as Ayala? Because I didn’t get a £1,000,000? Because putting a paragraph acknowledgment on the web was more than I’m worth? Or was it because if they’d cited my position on the science/religion collision it would have been insufficiently appeasing?

Excuse me, I have to retire to my fainting couch and weep hot, bitter tears for a while. There are friends of the NCSE’s goals, and then there are special friends of the NCSE, and we can clearly see who’s in the popular clique…and it overlaps more with Templeton cronies than it does the humanist and atheist community. <sniffle>

(Actually, I did not expect a notice from the NCSE, and that’s OK. I’m just disgusted that they find a prize for pandering to religion to be at all newsworthy.)

I have been corrected: the NCSE published a brief note about the Humanist of the Year award in RNCSE 29:4, p. 10. Yay! I feel positively affirmated!

Tim Tebow gets a lesson

Tebow is an obnoxious hyper-religious football player. He recently had to take some kind of test with a group of other players, and this is what happened:

At the Scouting Combine, the Wonderlic exam is administered to players in groups.  The 12-minute test is preceded by some brief instructions and comments from the person administering the test.

Per a league source, after the person administering the test to Tebow’s group had finished, Tebow made a request that the players bow their heads in prayer before taking the 50-question exam.

Said one of the other players in response:  “Shut the f–k up.”  Others players in the room then laughed.

I think a lot of people are getting fed up with the excessive piety, and I’m glad some are speaking out. Tebow wants to pray, fine; Tebow wants to drag others into his delusion, fire back.

By the way, Tebow got a 22 out of 50 on the test. I had to look up this Wonderlic test — it seems to be a remarkably trivial ‘intelligence’ test of the sort you might see in a grade school, I would think. “When rope is selling at $.10 a foot, how many feet can you buy for sixty cents?” and “A boy is 16 years old and his sister is twice as old. When the boy is 22 years old, what will be the age of his sister?”, that sort of thing, nothing that requires any reasoning beyond elementary algebra.

I’m shocked that a grown man could get below 50% on this thing.

In which I am convinced I’ll never get any money from  the Templeton Foundation

It’s tough to tread that line between contempt and admiration: Jerry Coyne writes about the Templeton journalism awards. It really is a smart move on the part of the Templetonites to coopt journalists to sell their bankrupt line by tossing a good-sized chunk of money at them.

One interesting revelation is that the journalism awards aren’t simply handed out by cunning Templetonistas who spot a promising compromiser in the ranks of reporters — you have to apply for the fellowship. Hey, should I? They’re closed for now, but I imagine there will be a bunch of 2011 fellowships awarded, and I wouldn’t mind spending time in Cambridge.

All I have to do is write an essay “outlining [my] interest in science and religion and detailing a specific topic [i] hope to cover”. Here’s my start:

Religion is the antithesis of science, an anesthetic for the mind that disables critical thought and encourages the acceptance of inanity as fact, and wishful thinking as evidence.

Do you think it will appeal to their review panel?

Oh, probably not. Here’s John Horgan’s experience.

One Templeton official made what I felt were inappropriate remarks about the foundation’s expectations of us fellows. She told us that the meeting cost more than $1-million, and in return the foundation wanted us to publish articles touching on science and religion. But when I told her one evening at dinner that — given all the problems caused by religion throughout human history — I didn’t want science and religion to be reconciled, and that I hoped humanity would eventually outgrow religion, she replied that she didn’t think someone with those opinions should have accepted a fellowship. So much for an open exchange of views.

Oops. And John is so much more polite than I am.

Now I really wish those application essays were available for public reading. I’m sure they’re exceptionally entertaining.

Mooney ‘fesses up. I’d love it if he’d post his application essay!